A milestone failure within the medical device industry can be viewed as a learning opportunity and improvement area no matter what stage of the project planning phase it occurs in. With that being said if the failure is to occur during an early stage, then this looks poorly on part of the project manager since it is their responsibility to do proper research and establish business needs/logistics of the product being set for launch. During early phases of the project management plan there is little room for failure and can be negative for the product since executives may rethink the decision to pursue the product if failures are met early in the development phase, and instead choose to cut their losses. Now later on in the product development timeline a failure can be better off in long run if for example, a key component within the product is identified to cause an adverse reaction this issue can be fixed rather than dealing with the consequences later. During these later stages it comes down to the circumstances of the failure and many companies will conduct risk analysis on how to approach certain failures. Therefore in the end a failure can be viewed as either a positive or negative outcome depending on the path the company takes, however earlier the failure occurs it is more likely that it is a negative outcome.